Authors

Billie Travalini

As an unwanted child with lupus, Billie Travalini spent much of her childhood with foster families and in Delaware’s childcare institutions. After serving 11 years on the State Planning Council for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, she works as an educational consultant specializing in troubled youth.

Currently, she also teaches at Lincoln University, at Wilmington University, and in the Boys and Girls Clubs Pegasus ArtWorks program.

She is the author of Bloodsisters, a memoir, which won the Lewis and Clark Discovery Prize and the Delaware Press Association Award for nonfiction.

As a former journalist, she photographed and was the principle writer for Wilmington Senior Center: Fifty Years of Community and co-edited with Fleda Brown, The Mason-Dixon Line: An Anthology of Contemporary Delaware Writers, to be published by the University of Delaware Press, 2008.

She is a fiction editor of The Journal of Caribbean Literatures and has received Individual Artist fellowships in fiction and poetry from the Delaware Division of the Arts.

Quote of the day

The oldest books are still only just out to those who have not read them.

Samuel Butler

There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away nor any coursers like a page of prancing poetry.

Emily Dickinson

There are books...which take rank in your life with parents and lovers and passionate experiences, so medicinal, so stringent, so revolutionary, so authoritative.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you; the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse, and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was.

Ernest Hemingway

A book is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there-that of the pulse, the heart beat.

Henry Miller

I know every book of mine by its smell, and I have but to put my nose between the pages to be reminded of all sorts of things.

George Gissing

O, let my books be then the eloquence and dumb presagers of my speaking breast.

William Shakespeare

Books constitute capital. A library book lasts as long as a house, for hundreds of years. It is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.

Thomas Jefferson

A book is like a man-clever and dull, brave and cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm too near the sun.

John Steinbeck

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.